Wednesday, August 28, 2013

Conspiracy Guy

I'm the conspiracy guy in my little circle of friends, and there is a pretty good chance you are too.Now I don't spend inordinate amounts of time charting out all the various threads of connection between all the different government agencies and powerful people, at least not anymore.Also I don’t stay awake at night worrying about the NSA mapping my brain waves, even though my wife took away my tin foil hat.

My belief in conspiracies is really quite simple. I believe powerful people would like to stay that way, and will orchestrate events to either enhance their power or maintain it. I think, in some instances, they love this power more than they love their own life, and especially more than they love your life. If you get between one of these people and their power, they will kill you. In this sense, an American is no different from anyone else.To assume thatbad people weaseled themselves into positions of power in times past and in other countries but that such a thing could never happenhereand now is phenomenally stupid.

Governments lie on a perpetual basis.It's in their nature.They lie to establish themselves, they lie to maintain themselves, and they lie to weed out the competition. If the government ever told the populace the whole truth about anything, it would be the first time. Since a lie has to usually be propped up with other lies, these deceptions give birth to a whole stable full of other deceptions.Records have to be altered, witnesses have to be silenced, and critics have to be smeared.

In no particular order, here are some big-scale events in recent American history where, at the very least there appears to be more goingon than meets the eye.These events also resulted in great shifts of power and influence into the hands of a handful of people.

1) Apollo Moon Landing.Honestly, here's what I think. I think we probably did go to the moon, but I've always thought it a bit risky from a government PR perspective tobroadcast it live into people's living rooms. This was an unprecedented event, and not only was all of America watching, but the entire world was watching.What if something had gone wrong? What if the astronauts had died or had some sort of equipment failure?The loss of face in the internationalcommunity, especially to the Soviets, would have been unbearable. The government had spentvast quantities of cash and couldn’t afford a failure. So what do you do? Well you simply broadcast an error-free version of the lunar landing into people's living room at some point after the real landing has happened.If something would have gone wrong, the general public would never know about it. If you wanted to be spectacularly clever about it, you could have the fake moon landing be as close as possible in sequence and in events to the real moon landing so that later on the recollections of astronauts and otherNASA employees line up with people’s memories of what they saw on their television sets.

My theory also eliminates the oft-cited weakness of a hoaxed landing; the necessary inclusion of hundreds of people in the conspiracy. If what people saw in their living rooms was staged, while the real Apollo crew landed on the moon, only a handful need be in on the fakery.

So what came out of all that? NASA pretty much put a lockdown on any private space travel for 4 decades after that, citing their stellar (pun intended)achievements.There was a river of money that flowed into NASA for my entire life. Somehow the government, who couldn’t run the Post Office without hemorrhaging money, was put in charge of outer space. This gave the government great clout, and the necessary platforms to launch any number of spy satellites with almost no civilian knowledge. That’s quite a bang for your buck.

2) Assassination of JFK. Out of all the ways in which a man could be killed, I’ve always thought it interesting that Kennedy’s killers chose to do so publicly.He could have died in his sleep, he could have been poisoned, he could have ‘slipped’ in the bath tub, but for some reason, the architects of his demise thought it better to blow off the back (or the front) of his head from behind (or in front, or to the side) in broad daylight before a crowd of witnesses (many of whom died soon after).There was a statement being made; look what we can do.

But even assuming that a mediocre marksman like Oswald could pull off those amazing shots (I’d love to know how to shoot a man from behind while making entry wounds in the front) and then race down 4 flights of stairs (without being seen by the girl on the 4th floor stairs) in time to be seen by a cop drinking a Coke30 seconds later, Oswald didn’t have the ability to bungle the handling of the President’s body, or the altering of the autopsy records or to ensure the loss of the autopsy photos or thewithholding of the Zapruder film for years or theor to set up the frames being shown out of sequence or even to prepare his own assassination ( also done very publicly).Lone guman? Really?

Out of that came LBJ’sPresidency, theescalation offoreign intervention in Vietnam , the further entrenchment of the military-industrial complex, andLBJ’sGreat Societyincome redistributionempire.Once again, a great investment for what it cost them.

3) September 11 I can’t even begin to dig into all thestrange things that happened that day, but it’s really simple; buildings like that don’t collapse from fire.They never have in theentire history of steel buildings, but yeton Sep 11th,3 of them did, including WTC 7 which wasn't hit by a plane. I remember being home that day and telling my wife "That looks like a controlled demolition". Later on it came out that not only were explosions reported by cops, firefighters, eyewitnesses, news crews, etc, but they found unexploded thermite residue in the rubble. So what came out of that? Well, to my reckoning , just about every insane power grab by the government has been tied back to the fall of the towers. No longer were we a people concerned with liberty, now we were a people concerned with safety. Our military was trotted off to half a dozen or so foreign lands (and counting), and blood was spilled and money spent, all with talking heads like Sean Hannity saying empty slogans such as '9/11 changed everything'. The President, doesn't need Congress to go to war, you silly ninny; 9/11 changed everything. Naked body scanners at airports ( and bus stations, and football games and proms) can't possibly be opposed because after all, 9/11 changed everything. The NSA are the good guys when they read your mail because 9/11 changed everything. The Presidential oath to uphold the Constitution was replaced with a mandate to 'keep the American people safe' because 9/11 changed everything. Every cop, firefighter, mailman, and dog catcher was a 'hero' because 9/11 changed everything. Changed it to what?

4) Boston Bombing If I follow this correctly, here's roughly what happened. Two guys who may or may not have been on the FBI watch list blow up two pressure cookers full of metal shrapnel at the close of the Boston marathon. We know this because there is video footage of them walking around with backpacks, and the FBI found the remains of the backpacks, post-explosion. Never mind that there were thousands of people walking around with backpacks that day, and never mind that the backpacks they were carrying don't appear to be full. Never mind that the backpacks they were wearing don't even match the one the police found. So after the two brothers who may or may not have been CIA assets steal a car, or not and kill a policeman, or not, the one brother runs over the other brother and then manges to evade the entire world looking for him within the city limits of Boston for several days. Whole blocks of the city were cordoned off, but apparently he wasn't there. Then the entire city was put under martial law shelter in place as armed men in military uniforms went door to door without a warrant. the people of Boston who couldn't leave their homes, even though Dunkin Donuts stayed open, welcomed the armed men into their homes while cheering them as heroes in a city marked for its refusal to bow to the whims of the British crown. When the police finally lifted the martial law shelter in place ( sorry) the remaining brother who may or may not have been wounded and may or may not have been armed had a gun battle, or not, with police , but not before scrawling out a confession in his own blood on the inside of the boat. This confession wasn't found till later, but hey, who's keeping score, right? The bullet-perforated suspect was then taken into custody and questioned for several hours without a lawyer present and under the influence of pain medications, where he confessed to everything short of the torpedoing of the Lusitania. Do you see what I mean? Do you see how these events always lead to an increase in the power of the state to trample the Constitution? The way things are right now, any one of us could be put in a cage for the rest of our lives for anything or nothing. But hey, I'm sure that it will all turn out OK. What do I know, I'm just your friendly neighborhood conspiracy guy.